Ad agency Leagas Delaney in Hamburg, Germany, came up with these clever
posters for Plant for
the Planet, an organization that stemmed from a 9-year-old's school
assignment.
A few years ago, 9-year-old Felix Finkbeiner was given the task of writing
a school report about climate change. While working on the report, Felix
ran across the story of Kenyan environmental activist Wangari
Maathai, who worked to plant trees across Africa. Felix proposed that
children from across the country could do the same thing. He suggested
a goal of planting 1 million trees, starting with his own school who planted
the first tree in March, 2007.
Felix was elected to the United Nations Environment Programme and his
school project turned into a real organization. In 2011, they reached
their goal of planting 1 million trees. Now, how cool is that?
Photo: Elmar Akhmetov, Kazakhstan, Winner, Low Light, Open Competition
The winners of the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards have been announced.
Over 55,000 entries were submitted by amateur photographers from around
the world for the Open competition, and World Photography Organisation
has the gallery of the winning entries: Link
Karasimir Matarov, Bulgaria, Winner, Nature and Wildlife, Open Competition
Gilbert Yu, Hong Kong, Winner, Arts and Culture, Open Competition
Hoang Hiep Nguyen, Vietnam, Winner, Enhanced, Open Competition
Matias Galvez, Chile, Winner, Split Second, Open Competition
View the rest of the winners over at World Photo Org: Link
Many book cover re-imaginations are deadly dull, but these ones by London-based
graphic designer Sharm Murugiah
is like an adrenaline shot right through the heart. Check out these awesome
Quantin Tarantino screeplays re-imagined as Penguin-style book covers.
Food artist Hong Yi, whom we've
featured on Neatorama a
few times before, is back. This time, she illustrates the Three Little
Pigs fairy tale with food. As you can clearly see, chili and peanut butter
always win.
Here's how she did it:
House 1: Angel hair pasta
House 2: Biscuit sticks
House 3: Dried chilli, with peanut butter as mortar
Ground: peanut butter and dill
Chimney smoke and clouds: Mayonnaise
Wolf: Charcoal bread, and olives for nose
Lines: Marmite
Head on over to her blog to see the third plate and alternate ending
to the Three Little Pigs saga: Link
- via 22
Words
If this looks like an entrance to a world completely alien to most of us, that's because it is. These tunnels lead to Manhattan.
Photographer Patrick Cashin snapped these amazing photos of the East Side Access project for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, showing the progress of the underground tunneling project that will allow the Long Island Rail Road to access Grand Central Terminal. Clearly, these magnificent photos show that tunneling projects are never boring
What does the image above remind you of? I know! Acorns, right? That's
how researchers found the evolutionary missing link of the modern-day
acorn worm, a wee invertebrate that live on the seabed.
Because they lack hard bones, soft-bodied marine animals aren't typically
well preserved in fossils, but a specimen was found in the early 1900s
in the fossil-rich area of Burgess Shale, Canada. While past researchers
in the Smithsonian staff missed the connection, evolutionary biologist
Jean-Bernard Caron
didn't dick around when it comes to realizing that this was the missing
evolutionary link:
... [Caron] “stumbled on drawers full of these worms” at
the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “I said, ‘Oh
my gosh.’ I noticed a lot of these worms in bizarre-shaped rings,
like mini Michelin tires in the rock,” said Caron, a co-author
of the study.
After Caron and colleagues looked more closely at the fossils, they
realized the newfound worm “really connects a lot of dots”
in the evolution of hemichordates.
Get loads more info over at this piece by Christine Dell'Amore over at
Neational Geographic's Weird & Wild blog: Link
We've told you how a dad hacked Donkey Kong so his young daughter can
play
Pauline and rescue Mario. Now, it's Zelda's turn. Animator Kenna W.
hacked The Legend of Zelda to allow you to play as Princess Zelda
and rescue the Hylian boy: Link
(heh, get it?) - via Kotaku
Baby Pears, found at a supermarket in Beijing, China, is undoubtedly
delicious. Problem is, you have to eat it before it wakes up and devour
all of your family at night ... Link
- via Nerdcore
Mustaches always get the ladies. Just ask the newly found Australian
pygmy moth. It didn't just get named by researchers the "Casanova"
moth for nothing:
Researchers say they named the newly designated subgenus "Casanovula"
(within the genus Pectinivalva) because these metallic-colored species
sport mustache-like patches that seem to helpthem lure females by spreading
their scent.
These patches — which look like overlapping shells up close —
can be found on their front legs, wings or abdomen and they are thought
to help disperse scent from a close range during courtship of the female.
Romantic bouquet: The male Pectinivalva minotaurus has two kinds
of shell-like scent scales on the abdomen to woo the female. Image: Landcare
Research and Naturalis Biodiversity Center.
One of the group's more remarkable species is Pectinivalva (Casanovula)
minotaurus, named for the bull-headed Minotaur of Greek myths.
The male of this species has two different kinds of the scent-spreading
tufts on its abdomen and huge, bizarrely flattened antennae, researchers
say.
Meet Tintina, a piece of broken rock that the Curiosity Mars rover ran
over (I've been waiting to be able to say that) on the Red Planet. The
rock broke up and revealed an unusual white color that indicates the presence
of hydrated minerals that formed when water flowed in that area:
The description of hydrated minerals at Gale Crater follows an announcement
last week that Curiosity had found clay minerals in a rock it had drilled.
These clays indicate formation in, or substantial alteration by, neutral
water.
That is significant for showing that conditions on the Red Planet could
have supported life in the distant past, because many rocks studied
previously were probably deposited in acidic water.
Speaking here in The Woodlands, near Houston, chief scientist John
Grotzinger described Curiosity's landing site as the first truly habitable
environment found on Mars.
"What we're really excited about is that this is the first time
we've been able to follow through with a whole suite of different measurements
that really demonstrate the place we found at Gale Crater was a very
viable, habitable environment," he told BBC News.
Working
parents rely on daycare facilities to take care of their children when
they work during the day, but what happens if your job is at night?
Not a problem in Sweden, where they have night nurseries:
"At first it was very hard to take my kids to sleep somewhere
else and my heart was aching," says mother Maria Klytseroff, 39,
a part-time care assistant for people with learning difficulties.
Her children spend about two or three nights a week at one of the preschools,
which is more like a homely apartment than an education centre.
"I am a single mum and I wanted to go back to my job, which is
at night," explains Maria.
"The children soon got used to it, they have friends and they
adore the workers who look after them." [...]
The toddlers arrive in time to eat dinner, clean their teeth and then
enjoy a bedtime story with a member of staff.
But not everyone is sold on the idea. Read more over at the BBC: Link
Last week, we ran a Choose
Your Own Star Wars Prize giveaway, exclusively for the subscribers
of NeatoMail, our new email newsletter. It was a really easy contest -
all you had to do was choose the item you'd like from the NeatoShop's
selection of Star Wars
items.
Well, it's time to pick the winners, using the random number algorithm
from random.org. Congrats to the winners below (they've all been notified
via private mail)
Wanna play? The game is only open to subscribers of NeatoMail (here's
a sample).
The good news is that it's super easy to join (just follow the instruction
to confirm your email address):
The geek Interweb is atwitter with the rumored iWatch, the mythical "smartwatch"
that Apple is supposed to be working on. The iWatch, if such thing even
exists, will be able to sync up to the iPhone - so you can view who's
calling or texting you simply by glancing down on your wrist.
There's
plenty of interest amongst Apple and tech enthusiasts - after all, the
concept of a smart wristwatch has been around since the golden era of
Dick Tracy, a comic
strip first drawn by Chester Gould back in the late 1930s.
And most recently, the huge interest that surrounds the Pebble Watch
resulted in the company receiving more than $10 million from nearly 70,000
people on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. The Pebble watch is based
on ePaper technology
and if a scrappy startup could do it, imagine what a company the size
of Apple could do. (Note: smart Android-based watches already exist, but
so far they haven't made the big splash one'd expect. See the i'm
Watch review over at the-Gadgeteer, for example)
No doubt that wristwatches are highly fashionable and very much coveted
accessories (the
list of watches that are more expensive than a Ferrari is suprisingly
long) and that Apple has a knack of creating great products that critics
dismiss out of hand at first (remember the iMaxiPad
joke on MADtv?), but does the concept of an iWatch - basically, an
always on, small iPhone on your wrist - make sense to you? (Personally, I don't
get it).
Does the idea of being able to glance at your wrist to see who texted
or called you is worth the alternative method of spending a few seconds
to grab the actual iPhone out from your pocket or purse? (Because, you
know, who actually carries their phone in their hands all the
time?)
And what about the function of actually telling the time? Marshal Cohen
of consumer research firm NPD Group (who's a big fan of the iWatch concept,
by the way) noted that whenever he approached teenagers wearing a watch and
ask them what time it is, as a way to do real-life research on the topic,
they almost always pull a phone out of their pocket to check.
So what do you think about the iWatch or whole concept of a smartwatch,
Neatoramanauts? Great idea or a stupid one?
